Gingrich says GOP is outmatched

“The Republican Party right now is like a midsize college team trying to play in the Superbowl,” Gingrich told me Wednesday. “It is pretty hard to say our losses were because of John McCain’s campaign. McCain performed way above plausibility compared to where the Republican president was in the polls. We have to look honestly at what went wrong.”

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Gingrich, Republican speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999, declined say who he wanted as the next chairman of the party. He said his main concern was the rise of what he called the “modern left,” which just a few years ago was thought to be moribund in this country but now looks alive and kicking.

Gingrich said the fundraising capacity of the left in the last election proved astonishing and far outstripped what Republicans were able to gather. “The modern left has gotten that large,” Gingrich said.

The question now, Gingrich went on, is whether Barack Obama intends to govern from the left or not.

“Does Barack Obama want to govern from the center, which his Grant Park speech implied, or govern from the left?” Gingrich said. “Does he want to govern through (Harry) Reid and (Nancy) Pelosi or govern through a centrist majority, in which case he will get a substantial number of votes in the House and Senate but he will make the left unhappy.”

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Gingrich said that the best thing the Republican Party could do right now is stop worrying about the Republican Party. “We need to worry about the nation,” Gingrich said. “Wal-Mart doesn’t get ahead by attacking Sears but by offering better value.”

It wasn’t all that long ago that the Democratic Party was going through the same kind of agonizing re-appraisals, bemoaning the fact that it couldn’t raise as much money as Republicans, build as impressive a ground operation or field as compelling candidates.

But Barack Obama’s election to the presidency and increased Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have swept all that away and now Republicans are wondering how to get through their wilderness years.

Greg Mueller, a political consultant who specializes in conservative candidates, said that the next chairman of the party must be an “ideological conservative.”

“We need full-throttle conservatism,” Mueller said. “We have governed as lighter versions of liberal Democrats. We went to Washington to be fiscal conservatives and we became profligate spenders and big-government bureaucrats.”

Mueller went on: “It is very unpopular to be a Republican right now, but it is very popular to be a conservative. The conservative brand is the most popular brand in the country, but we didn’t run as conservatives.”